Like Peter Frampton said, “take me by the hand.” Photos: Screenshot
When Jules Casey, an Australian diver who frequently dives in a spot where Maori Octopuses call home, pulled on her fins and entered the water, she didn’t expect to have such an intimate interaction.
Casey got up-close-and-personal with the octopus as it took her by the hand and seemingly led her to something it found interesting.
“This encounter happened towards the end of my dive,” she wrote on Instagram. “I don’t know if I found him or if he found me. He reached out his arm to hold my hand and in that moment it felt like he wanted me to follow him.”
This particular octopus is familiar with Casey. They’ve met a few times near the Mornington Peninsula not far from Melbourne, and Casey has developed a bit of a fondness for him.
“Since we last met he has lost the tips off most of his arms and has a few white patches,” she wrote. “I’m guessing that he’s been mating and is getting close to the end of his life. I followed him for several minutes and he took me to a location I’d never visited before. There was a headstone tied between two steel posts. On the headstone was a picture of a young man holding his white fluffy dog. I’d love to know the story behind this but for now it’s all a mystery.”
Casey found out thanks to her connections in the diving community. According to reports in Australia, the shine was created by a local dive-shop owner. The man’s name who appears in the picture is Lorenz, who had passed away. Markers forming a loop leading to the shrine is now referred to as “Lorenz’s Loop,” a tribute to a fallen friend. The creature had led Casey to this beautiful underwater memorial.
The octopus, as you’re no doubt aware, is a very intelligent creature. A million and one studies have been done to discern exactly how intelligent they are, but “intelligence” is a bit of a hard thing to define. Human intelligence can be much different than animal intelligence, but researchers have tried different methods to make things clear.
There are a few things that they do that show just how brainy they are. “Octopuses play, and play is something that intelligent animals do,” Jennifer Mather, a comparative psychologist who has been studying octopuses for 35 years in an effort to gain insight into the evolution of intelligence, told Scientific American. “At the Seattle Aquarium, my colleague Roland Anderson and I figured out a situation in which they might play: a boring situation. We gave them an empty tank and a floating pill bottle and waited to see what would happen. Nothing happened the first time, but, after the fourth time, a couple animals did something we call ‘play.’ The octopus blew a jet of water at the pill bottle and that caused it to go over a water jet in the tank and come back to the octopus. These two individual animals did it in a sequence over 20 times. That’s just exactly the kind of thing we do when we bounce a ball. When you bounce a ball, you are not trying to get rid of the ball, you are trying to figure out what you can do with the ball.”
Interestingly, they also have distinct personalities. Mather and her colleagues designed a handful of tests that were intended to put names to some of the most basic of those personalities.
“We put them in three common situations: alerting (opening the top of the tank), threatening (touching the octopus with a test tube brush) and feeding (the octopus was given a crab to munch),” Mather continued. “This takes a while because we tested 33 animals, each for two weeks. We found there are three dimensions and we settled for names: activity, reactivity and avoidance. Avoidance is how shy you are. Activity is if you are very active or passive. And reactivity indicates whether you are very emotional or more blasé. Octopuses can have any mix of those traits. We didn’t take it any further, but there’s a former graduate student in Australia looking at the extent to which personality affects ecology.”
All this is to say that, yes, octopuses are very smart, and Casey’s interaction further supports all the research, but in a much more special way.
